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Reading, Privacy, and the Google Book Settlement

An excellent article by Kassia Kroszer on Booksquare nicely sums it all up (saving me a heck of a lot of time); here’s just one excerpt: “If the settlement is approved, then Google owns lots and lots of readers. We’re locked into the Google service if we want the best possible search results. Yet our [...]

My first post, and, because it’s Friday, some 1952 news footage of the first museum handheld. [Take 2]

Thanks for the introduction Nik, but where do I start? My inclination is to dive in and share my confoundedness about the abundance of auto-triggered audio tours in Israel.  Or to recall my nostalgia at discovering Japan to be not just the hi-tech whiz country of my imagination, but apparently the graveyard for much of [...]

Facebook: the Movie

Okay, too much Amazon, Google, and the End of Civilization as We Know It. Gotta lighten up for a while. The Register brings us, um, news of Facebook: the Movie. In a rather original storyboard style that lends it a certain, oh, je ne sais quoi. Enjoy.

More Brotherly Love

I’m currently in that period of time just before the annual AAM conference when I realise I agreed to do way more than I can probably do in a reasonable amount of time. I had such good plans about properly planning my time and devoting the right amount of time to each of my commitments [...]

New Kid on the Block

Coming soon, we have an addition to the Musematic team – Loïc Tallon, author, bon vivant and world traveller will be joining the Musematic “intrepid cast of experts” – which begs the question of what I’m doing here. In a shameless pitch, his book Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media, [...]

Amazon, search, and freedom of choice

The dust from this week’s “amazonfail” brouhaha has settled, but the issue at stake hasn’t been. There’s a very good analysis at Bookoven and another at Techcrunch. But the best I’ve seen is on Vroman’s (the legendary Pasadena bookstore) blog: By now, you’ve probably heard all you care to hear about Amazon’s incredibly stupid decision [...]

Amazon’s Kindle and the Right to Hear the Written Word

Just in case you weren’t entirely sure that sanity in the world of digital media is an endangered species, read up not only on the Google Book Search settlement, but the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech copyright infringement claim: Yesterday, hundreds of people gathered in front of the headquarters of The Authors Guild in New York City [...]

PC Magazine and the end of print

Okay, this is really going to date me, but here goes. I’m probably one of five people on the planet who noticed that PC Magazine has dropped its print edition. I note it only out of nostalgia (and nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, anyway). Somewhere back in what now seems like the Chalcolithic [...]

Warm and Fuzzy

There’s a new and free downloadable report from idealware: Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone. Fan-f*****g-tastic. A timely document particularly if you see that one of the Horizon Report for Museums’ key technologies is Collection Systems (CMS, DAM, CIS). You can download the report described as: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and [...]

Google Image Search and Fair Use

German courts have, twice, found Google’s Image Search infringing under German copyright law. This is a striking reminder, and we need one, that Fair Use is a US copyright doctrine. It does not exist in other copyright regimes, with the notable exception of the new Israeli copyright law. The UK has Fair Dealing, and the [...]